Installing Solr in Windows or Linux?

HomeEnterprise Search Installing Solr in Windows or Linux?
Feb
08

Installing Solr in Windows or Linux?

by in Enterprise Search, General, Solr

I have been a fan of Microsoft technologies all my life, probably because I’ve spent a lot of time working with .Net and related technologies. Eventually I became also an Apple fanboy as some people have called me.

But something that I haven’t been called a fan of is Linux. Don’t get me wrong, I think Linux is extremely important, but in my case I have not worked with it as much as I think I should have.

But now I am in a part of my life where I need to run Apache Solr in a production environment. What do I do? What comes naturally.

In a nutshell I set up a Windows machine in Amazon AWS, install Java, download Solr, java -jar start.jar, modify solrconfig.xml, modify schema.xml, turn around a few more knobs and test. Once I am happy I install Tomcat and voila, I have a single node for production. It is a small application with very few documents and a reasonable traffic, so it is all good. And besides, it is amazing how much a Solr instance in AWS can handle.

Anyway, my need keeps growing and I believe I need to set up a more resilient installation. Of course SolrCloud comes to mind, but I am thinking of how the pros install Solr.

So what do I do? Install Solr in a Linux AMI. Also, as I need monitoring now in place I set up SemaText. One downside of Windows is that at least when using SemaText, you can’t monitor on Windows, only Linux.

And there you go, that is my piece of advise. But not only from me, I’ve heard from many sources that Linux can be more performant and stable when running Apache Solr.

If you want to get more information on how to install Solr in a Linux instance, please follow the following link to the Apache Solr Reference Guide: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Taking+Solr+to+Production

Also, if you want to learn more about Getting Started with Enterprise Search with Apache Solr, please follow this link to my course on this subject:
www.pluralsight.com/courses/discussion/enterprise-search-using-apache-solr


About the Author:

Xavier is an entrepreneur, project manager, trainer, Certified Scrum Master & Professional and Certified Microsoft professional who has spent a great deal of his career working on cutting edge projects, with a primary focus on .Net and recently iOS. His expertise is primarily web applications, search and mobile. Throughout multiple projects he has acquired skills in dealing with complex enterprise software deployments with companies that range from startups to Microsoft. Also worked as a worldwide v-trainer/evangelist for Microsoft.
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2 Comments:

  1. Morné June 30, 2015

    Hi Xavier. Do you know if there are any decent guides out there for setting up Solr 5.2+ on Windows Server for production?

  2. Xavier November 07, 2016

    Apologies for not seeing this earlier. I was pretty much bombarded by a few thousand spam messages. Long story short:

    – I don’t know of a public guide on setting it up and as these guys replied https://qnalist.com/questions/5962395/taking-solr-5-0-to-production-on-windows. One of the reasons is that Linux is the defacto standard for going to production
    – I do have a guide for an install that we recently did for a huge Fortune 100 company but because it was created for this specific project, I can’t share
    – But I can give you an overall idea, namely they
    – Have SolrCloud
    – And they are in Windows Azure
    – They set up Tomcat
    – And they had to install as service, so they used NSSM to set up as a service (https://nssm.cc/)

    It works fine

    Hope it helps

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